


Flight

by Harukami



Series: Gravity [1]
Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 04:28:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2568200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harukami/pseuds/Harukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Clear and Aoba decide to chase a butterfly and also Aoba's family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flight

When Aoba learns to relax, he finds he enjoys the bizarre ride. Clear isn't going to let him fall; that's a fact. Left to himself, Clear can be careless when he runs across the city, can slip and fall, but that's because Clear knows he won't be damaged, even if he's hurt. Clear feels pain as well as any man, but a broken limb will repair itself, a bruise will be gone almost before he can peel a shirt sleeve back to look at it, a cut will pull itself back together and leave only that blood-like oil remaining on his skin, his clothes. Clear doesn't like pain, but falling a few stories is nothing in terms of _impact_. That's Clear's natural state, and they've made sure it stays like that. 

But even that's when Clear's left to himself. When Aoba is with Clear, it's another story. 

They won't fall. They never fall. Clear leaps from building to building like he's -- well. Like he's a machine, well-oiled and smooth and perfectly capable of acting like a vehicle. He stops lumberingly flinging himself from ledge to ledge and starts leaping and calculating and grabbing like he's carrying something much more valuable to himself than himself. Aoba chides him for it sometimes, and Clear cries, or pretends to cry, which makes Aoba always unsure if it's sunk home. It's hard to convince Clear to really value himself as something other than the Clear who loves Aoba, and Aoba wants him to value himself as the Clear who is Clear, but he thinks that Clear is working toward it. That's all he asks. He can't ask for miracles.

Though traveling with Clear does, itself, feel like a miracle.

Once he's really begun to _feel_ the fact that Clear won't drop him, when he's really begun to know it down to his bones, he became able to stop clinging onto Clear with the fear for his life and start relaxing, start looking around as they go. By now, it's old hat. At one point, holding on to Clear as the wind whistles around them and Clear hangs off the side of a tall casino building in the southern district, neon lights flashing below them, the distant sound of raucous music floating up from below, Aoba finds that he feels weightless, that Midorijima seems small below him, that the world is huge and that he and Clear are a part of the _world_ , not of Midorijima itself, that the sky is literally the limit, and then Clear twists, jumps, springs down thirty feet and twenty across, grabs onto the ledge of a whorehouse's window -- probably startling whoever's behind those closed shutters with the sudden clatter -- and swings himself up, gloved hands finding easy grips on the brick walls as he shimmies them to the roof.

That moment, between casino and whorehouse, probably lasts three or four seconds. To Aoba, right then, it feels like eternity. Not in terror, the way he'd felt that kind of jump when they first went out like this, but in something else. The flipside. Elation, maybe. He can feel the tight movement of muscles under Clear's skin -- or the parts he has in place of muscles, rather, but close enough -- and the sheer nothingness of space between this and that and it feels good; they aren't going to fall, they're going to _fly_ , and that's something he can only experience because of this person in his arms.

A thought, weird, wild, random, occurs to him and is out of his mouth before he can hold it back: "I wonder if this is what Mom felt like."

"Aoba-san?" Clear has paused on the rooftop, surveying the area around for his next target, and tilts his head back, nuzzling his cheek against Aoba's as he listens. "What was that?"

"Ah, no, it's stupid--"

"Your mother?"

"Well just--" And Aoba saves his breath as they leap again, kisses Clear's throat and feels Clear feel it and not let it distract him from grabbing onto a pipe and swinging them onto a ledge. He leans his chin on Clear's shoulder as Clear climbs, again, a taller building, to speak into his ear without the rush of wind whisking his words away. "My mother, you know, she lived in Midorijima her whole life until she met Dad."

They reach the top, and, as Clear runs to leap to the next building, he says, "We are still in Midorijima, however, Aoba-san?"

"Yes, but --" Another breathless leap, and Clear has decided to take them to his home, he sees, from the direction he's going. Perhaps bringing his parents up made the destination come to mind. "I don't think she was -- someone who wanted to take risks? Until then. But maybe, once they were together -- nothing felt like risks any more."

They land and Clear twists, catches Aoba around the waist, swings him off his back and around to his front, and kisses him delightedly. When their lips part again Aoba sees the look on his face, the joy and happiness there, the adoration, and, knowing that Clear understands what he meant by that, he feels his own heart lift in return, beams back, kisses him again, spontaneous.

***

They make love fast and wild, Aoba laughing and chiding Clear because they've barely stumbled up the stairs to Clear's room -- not that there's anyone living here any more, of course, to mind it -- and Clear is literally putting his mouth wherever he can get it, between Aoba's legs and mouthing at his thighs, his ass, his balls, his cock like it's all just a collection of places to taste and make Aoba squirm. He does, fingers tight in Clear's hair, squirms and gasps and cries out until he can't stand it any more, comes in Clear's mouth, and only then can he breathlessly tug Clear's hair in a way that convinces Clear to come up again, lean over him, slide into him. Fucking in a post-orgasmic haze isn't the same as doing it when he's freshly needy, but he likes this too; likes the satiated way it feels, like he's luxuriating in every movement of Clear's, stretching out under him and rolling back against him and being able to focus on the little details. The way Clear's breathing goes out of control, the flush on Clear's cheeks, the way Clear's skin looks under Aoba's hands as he traces patterns on it.

***

Later, lying together in Clear's narrow bed, the moonlight streaming in through the window and sending dancing lights off glass baubles to reflect like water through the room, on the walls, glittering in patches on Aoba's skin, on Clear's, Clear revisits the idea.

"You haven't talked about your parents before, Aoba-san," Clear says.

Aoba leans his head on Clear's chest, listens to the gentle thrum there. "I suppose not," he admits. "They left when I was really young."

"They left?" 

Clear says it in the tone of someone who thinks they might understand, but isn't sure, and is worried about misunderstanding, that tentative sounding-out. Aoba grimaces a little, only half a smile, and presses closer to feel Clear there against him. "It's not like they abandoned me," he says. "It's not -- what you think, Clear. They didn't throw me away. But they couldn't stay, either, so they left Midorijima."

"So they didn't abandon you," Clear echoes, and wraps an arm around Aoba. "But... they left?"

Aoba struggles with a way to put it into words. He hasn't, he thinks, even done this for himself, but perhaps it's better this way. If he's explaining it to Clear, he'll have to be honest about it. "I was really young at the time," he says again. "So -- it's not like I know everything, but I think it was because of Toue."

"But Toue-san is gone."

Aoba shrugs, a little melancholic now. "Sure, but I don't know if they have any way of knowing that. The world's a big place."

"Why did they have to leave because of Toue-san? I'd understand if they wanted to hide you, but they left you here--?" Clear's voice is gently quizzical.

Another shrug at that. "I don't think they knew that Toue would have any interest in me, or they might have taken me anyway," Aoba admits. "But Dad was on the run from Toue. I don't know why, or... I mean, maybe I knew once and don't remember, I was maybe six when they left, you know?"

Clear doesn't, obviously; doesn't know how different memory is for a child that young, the length of time aside -- but he nods anyway. "Yes, that was a long time ago."

"He always liked to wander, he couldn't stay in any place for long, and mom always went with him, but he also... I'm not sure it was his need to wander that made him have to leave when Toue started to secure the island borders," Aoba says. "He decided he had to go, and Mom decided she couldn't bear to be without him, so they both left to travel the world, and I stayed with Granny. It kind of --" it feels embarrassing to talk about this so bluntly, but he pushes through for the sake of Clear's understanding. "-- It broke my heart a little. I loved my parents so much. When they adopted me, it was like the entire world changed around me, even inside me. I don't know if that makes any sense..."

"It makes perfect sense," Clear bursts out, passionate, and Aoba pushes himself up a little to look down into his urgently sincere face. "I understand completely, Aoba-san, it was like that for me as well."

A little moved, even if he can't quite put his finger on why, Aoba draws a slow breath. "Clear..."

"It was the same way for me," Clear repeats. "Even though I was just trash, someone wanted me -- someone _chose_ me to be his family. Even though he had no reason to believe I would be anything except my original programming, regardless of his tweaks -- he had to doubt, you know, there were so many things he couldn't change but just _teach_ me not to do, not to think like -- but, despite that, he wanted me to be his family. He decided we could be family. Being that, being part of his family, I wanted so much to fit into the world he was envisioning. When he named me, when he called me 'Clear', when I wasn't a string of numbers and letters but a person, I became 'Clear'. I became his grandson, Clear, and I wanted so much to live up to that name. Even if it's a meaningless name, even if it just means that he wanted people to look through me and not see me, it was the name he gave me so I could stay with him--"

Aoba finds himself crying a little, swallows around the painful lump in his throat. "Dad gave me my name too. 'Aoba'. It cut through what I was before, I remember that much. I was so proud to have a name to call 'me' in all that noise...."

"Aoba-san," Clear says, and squeezes him for a moment, rushes all the air out of Aoba's lungs with the force of his embrace. "I'm so happy I can use that name, now, since it means so much to you."

"Me too."

"I thought I wouldn't have a family again," Clear says. "When my grandfather died. I was so lonely, and so sad. He asked me to sleep when he was gone, and I wanted to, because there was really nothing left for me. Even knowing he wasn't there, I buried him so carefully, because I wanted his happiness? It felt like I was burying my happiness along with him. But I do have a family, because Aoba-san welcomed me too. I'm a man of the Seragaki household, aren't I?"

Aoba can't help but laugh at that, wetly. "You are."

"I'm sure your parents leaving was, for them, like my sleeping, or like my mask," Clear says, earnest. "Ultimately, these were things that hampered my ability to be happy? But they were necessary, at the time, to survive. I'm sure Grandfather was right in that. If Toue-san found me again, he wouldn't have any use for me -- at least, not as I am, not as 'Clear'. And I'm sure they thought if they stayed on the island, they wouldn't be able to stay with you anyway, so if they had to be parted from you, they would do so in a way that had the chance they could reconcile someday. I'm sure, Aoba-san! Because they chose you to be their family, they will see you again."

"Well," Aoba says, heart pounding, "I don't know about that. They might not even remember me at all--"

Clear shakes his head furiously, tips of his hair flipping into Aoba's face; Aoba sputters. "There's no way, Aoba-san," he says. "The people who could make you become 'Aoba' would not be people who would ever forget you. I'm sure they're thinking of you even now. We should find a way to tell them they can come home and see you!"

Aoba sighs, relaxing into Clear again, a hint of humour in the tone of his breath. As always, somehow, when Clear says it, he can't find any disagreement inside himself despite his fears. As always, he just follows Clear on this strange winding way of thinking, this warm, wonderful way of thinking. "There's no way to do that, Clear," he points out, sensible. "I don't know where they are."

"We should find a way," Clear says, and Aoba kisses him. It's not so much to shut him up as simply to ride that moment with him; Clear's full of hope, determination, and Aoba tastes it on his mouth, smiles into it, lets himself believe the way Clear believes.

***

They make love more slowly the second time, careful and together, Aoba riding Clear, their hands locked together. Clear's strength holds Aoba up easily, and they gaze into each other's eyes like this, close and intimate, breath in unison, ragged and choppy but in unison. Aoba keeps moving slowly even after it becomes urgent, drags it out as long as either of them can handle it, and when he comes he gasps at the way it spills over him like water pouring from a bucket, the realization like the first few drops and then a needy unstoppable rush trembling through his body, Clear moaning sweetly and arching up under him, an equal rush inside him.

***

The next morning, as Clear serves breakfast, Tae comes back in from collecting the mail and puts something down in front of Aoba. "Aoba... looks like this is for you."

At first, Aoba doesn't pay it much mind, still waking up; but as he takes it in, a single postcard, his heart starts pounding. "Are you kidding?" he breathes. "Granny, Clear and I were just talking about them!"

That gets Clear's attention, and he crowds close, ruffles of his apron falling into Aoba's face as he leans over to peer at it. "Aoba-san, is it from your parents? It's from your parents!!"

Aoba starts to laugh, half with disbelief. "Well, there's no sender or return address, but--"

"But you know! You know. How do you know?" Clear asks, and puts the rice down.

"It's -- a butterfly. They're the only ones who would send this. They told me, once, to -- that -- someday I should go, too, and see a butterfly like this with my special person. When I was older, I mean," Aoba stammers, and feels himself blushing hard as the aforementioned special person's eyes gleam at him excitedly. "Well, I mean, it's not like I know where they sent this card from, but--"

"Aoba-san!!" Clear flings off his apron, tossing it onto Aoba. "Please finish serving breakfast!"

"Clear?!"

He snatches up the postcard. "I am getting Ren-san!!" His voice trails into the distance as he rushes up the stairs. "Ren-san! Ren-san, help us!! We need to find out where butterflies like this appear! A butterfly like this one, Ren-san--!"

Aoba sighs, rising and starting to put Clear's apron on. It's really amazing how frilly it is, he thinks. "Sorry, Granny. I'll help out after all..."

"You two," she sighs, taking a seat. "What kind of energy do you have this early in the morning?"

***

Aoba plays it cool and eats his breakfast like a normal person and goes up the stairs like a normal person and opens his door like a normal person only to find two very not normal people staring at him with glittering eyes.

Even Ren, he thinks mournfully, is getting this excited over just a postcard.

"Aoba-san!" Clear says, grabbing on to his arm and dragging him inside as he protests. "Ren-san and I are excellent detectives!"

"We are," Ren agrees sedately. "Aoba, we're perfectly acceptable as detectives."

Aoba groans. "Both of you... You two always plot against me."

Clear frowns at him with absolutely no severity in the expression. "Aoba-san, there's no 'against you'. We are plotting _for_ you."

"As Clear says," Ren agrees.

"What Ren-san means, when he says 'as Clear says'," Clear says, "is that we have tracked down the part of the world in which butterflies like this appear!"

Aoba is pretty sure that can be figured out by a reverse image search, but doesn't say as much. They both just seem so excited he doesn't have the heart to be a buzzkill. Instead, he just laughs and gives up, goes along with it. "And what do you want to do with that?"

"Well," Clear says, " _well_ , we could go and find your parents and tell them they could return whenever they wished?"

Aoba sighs again, still smiling. "They might know that now though? If they sent mail."

"They might," Ren agrees. "The possibility also exists that they simply saw the butterfly and thought to mail you because, Clear insists, you said it would make them think of you. Another possibility is that they have been sending regular mail, but it has not been coming through because of Toue's border restrictions, so this just happens to be the first to get through, and there are many other postcards from their travels somewhere held up in processing."

"Or burned. Toue-san's people probably wouldn't keep the mail they didn't plan to deliver."

"Or burned. A very good point, Clear."

"Then again, they didn't seem to care much about proper disposal of burnable garbage, did they, Ren-san?"

"Not terribly. The cards could be in a landfill somewhere."

"Yes, or--"

Aoba holds up a hand as if to physically intervene in the flow of their banter. "Okay. But they _could_ know, and just not have come back yet."

"Yes, but --" Clear catches his breath on some kind of plea, struggles to put it into words, and then just looks at Aoba with it raw in his eyes, on his face. "I'd like to see that butterfly with you, Aoba-san."

Ren wags his tail a little. "Aoba, Clear wants to fulfill that promise with you."

Put like that--! "You two," Aoba says, desperately fond. "You really _were_ plotting against me."

***

Tae just sighs when they tell her, says that she expected it sooner or later. Aoba's too much like his parents, she grumbles, and it was shocking he'd stayed in one place so long. Aoba, of course, expresses concern for her health -- and she just flings her chopsticks at him. "How old do you think I am?! I'm not going to kick off that easily!" so that is that, anyway. From there, it's just explaining things to Haga-san and Mizuki, both terribly easy-going people who wish them the best rather than hold them up.

And then, barely two weeks later, they're off.

Ren sleeps on the flight, of course, due to regulations with Allmate signals. Aoba wonders if Clear will be all right with that, but Clear's never seemed to connect to the same networks, and after Aoba's initial stomach-knotting moments of fear as they take off, there's no interference or turbulence, and he settles back to enjoy the flight.

Clear enjoys the flight significantly more; like Aoba, he's never been out of Midorijima, and unlike Aoba, Clear's imagination is a force that Aoba thinks could move the universe if it needed to. He plasters his face to the glass as they fly, gazing out at the clouds around the plane like he's never seen anything like it. "Aoba-san," he gasps. "Aoba-san, they look so thick, I want to reach out and touch them..."

Aoba wraps an arm around Clear's, because while he thinks Clear probably _won't_ open the airplane door in an attempt to climb onto the wing, the image of him doing just that is terrifyingly believable. "They're not really," he says. "It's just water vapor. Like the steam from the rice cooker when you first open it."

"I know what it _is_ ," Clear says, and turns to look at Aoba with his eyes bright. "But doesn't it look like you could just go out and bounce on it?"

Aoba looks at Clear's face, then past him to the clouds. "It kind of does, doesn't it?"

"Aoba-san, do you think jellyfish like clouds?"

"H-haa?!" Where did that even-?

"Because jellyfish look like that too," Clear explains, "Like you could just bounce on them. From above, a bloom of jellyfish look just like clouds, at least when the clouds are also seen from above. Don't you think so? Do you think they feel a sort of kinship?"

No matter how you think about it, a jellyfish in the ocean probably has no conception of a cloud in the sky. But Aoba looks past Clear, and tries to imagine it. 

"You know," he says, "I bet they do."

***

The flight lasts six hours. After that, Ren helps them translate, and they get a hotel room. It's warm and different here, and Aoba isn't sure he's ever stayed in a hotel room that didn't charge by the hour, and _that_ not since he was a teenager. Clear, of course, still has high energy, and Ren seems perfectly content to keep going however long Clear can; Aoba, however, collapses on the bed with a sigh.

Clear chatters at Ren for a while, them looking out the window together, sorting through the guide brochures on the desk together, then Clear alone putters around the room while Ren curls up next to Aoba, helping him get some quiet.

Finally, Clear too seems to settle, coming over and sitting next to them, watching Aoba. 

"Aoba-san?" he says, finally.

"Hm?"

"Will your parents like me?"

Aoba pushes himself up to his elbows. "This so suddenly? We've already come this far -- anyway, I don't even know if we'll find them..."

"But," Clear says. "Would they like me?"

The tentative way he asks sinks home for Aoba, and he reaches out and tugs Clear down to cuddle, Ren comfortable between them. Clear tucks his face into Ren's fluff a little, then glances up at Aoba over him again. 

"They'll love you, Clear," Aoba says.

"I don't know," Clear says. "I'm... I'm Toue tech, after all, and -- I mean, if they haven't seen you since you were a child, seeing you with another man may be a shock, and ... I mean, of all the people their son could fall in love with, an artificial human, who can't even live or die, perhaps that's not--"

"Clear," Aoba says again, and brushes some of his hair back. " _I_ love you. Forget living or dying. We're together right now. That's what matters, right? 'Now'. It's the only thing that's real. The past is gone, and the future hasn't happened yet."

"Aoba-san..." Clear presses close, letting out a sigh into Ren's fur.

Aoba smiles, draping an arm around them both. "Anyway, it's natural to be nervous. I'm nervous too, you know? It's been ages. Do you think they'll approve of the sort of adult I've become?"

"Of course--!"

"I bet even Ren's nervous."

"I am," Ren agrees, a little muffled between them. "As with Clear, meeting your parents like this is a little nerve-wracking, even without nerves."

"You see?" Aoba says. "Don't worry about it."

***

That night, Ren sleeping on the chair beside the bed, Aoba coaxes Clear into experimenting. Normally, he'll deny having any hand in encouraging Clear's weird interests. But Clear's so nervous, continually checking himself out in the mirror, pulling his eyelids around to look at his eyes, opening his mouth and peering in as if it were even possible to see the parts that make him up from here, which it absolutely isn't.

So Aoba leans up behind him and says, "You seem awfully interested in that mirror."

It's not hard, from there, to distract Clear, and once Clear is no longer fretting, he takes the reins, and maybe Aoba didn't expect to be tied to the hotel's desk chair with a couple of belts, watching his own face flicker and change as Clear sucks him off under the desk, as he has to keep his voice down thinking of the rooms around them, as his legs jerk and toes curl until Clear leans back and lets Aoba come over his head, come spattering across the mirror, and, panting, mortified, he thinks that he's absolutely going to have to be the one to clean that up, not let some poor hotel worker do it.

Clear agrees, and Aoba _had_ meant after, with some tissues or something, but there are worse things than being bent over the desk to lick it up while Clear fucks him, probably, worse things than seeing the way his own helpless moans fog up the glass in front of his face, worse things than looking up from his own hazy stare and red cheeks to look at Clear's face in the glass as they move together, Clear staring at him intensely, their gaze meeting in the mirror as Clear moves relentlessly behind him.

Though he does chide Clear about it. Later, of course.

***

It takes them almost a year of traveling, and Aoba finds that he actually quite enjoys it. When it's done, when _they're_ done, he thinks he'll like to go home for a while and rest, just enjoy the sense of _being_ home -- but in the moment, on the move, it's fun. With Ren, they can more or less muddle out everything they need to know to get by, and if they're careful, their joint savings actually stretch pretty far. It's no problem to pick up a part time job for a few months if they need to here and there. And it's interesting. The world's a big place, he thinks, even seeing this little of it; he has more of an idea of that now than ever.

He can see why his father might need this in his life. Not enough, perhaps, to get rid of his old lingering pain of loss, but enough to understand why his father might accept that same pain if he had to leave anyway, and use something like this as a way to keep going.

They travel from city to city, tracking news of his parents. They're a pretty recognizable couple, he figures, even if he doesn't really know _exactly_ what they look like now. A pale, red-haired man dressed in 'pair look' with an energetic pink-haired Japanese woman -- there's got to be only so many people who fit that description, right?

Every time he gets news, it only seems like just enough to find out that they've moved on from wherever they were. It's always 'a month ago' or 'two weeks ago' or even 'a few days ago' and it keeps them moving forward, but it never seems promising, and when he first hears real news, when Ren translates someone's statement as, "Aoba, she says they're staying in the hotel down the street," he almost doesn't understand it.

And then he does, and, gripping Ren's bag, he takes off at a run. He hears Clear call his name after, then follow; doesn't slow down, doesn't need to -- Clear can catch up to him any day, overtake him any day. He stammers out his questions to the hotel's front desk, can barely wait for Ren to translate the man's answer -- he picks out the room number without speaking the language, and that's enough, takes off again, takes the stairs rather than the elevator because he doesn't think he can wait without moving, can't handle the strain. He reaches the room, and knocks, and waits, and waits, and nobody answers.

His excitement turns to ash in his mouth. Painful, he lowers his head. Too late? A misunderstanding? Or they just don't want to see him?

Clear catches up behind him. "Aoba-san," he says. "I think they're not here--"

"I know."

"The man at the desk kept calling after you, I think it was this?" He carefully enunciates the phrase back; it doesn't mean anything to him, but his ear is perfect for pitch and tone, and Ren's ears twitch as he translates.

"Aoba. There's an open-air atrium in the hotel. The man Clear quoted said that he believed they were there instead of their room."

His heart pounds again and he turns around, almost confused. "An atrium? Where?"

"There's this fire safety diagram on the wall--"

Aoba turns and stares at the floorplan on the wall, frozen. He feels, somehow, if he moves he'll change things forever, but maybe that's right, maybe it's a bad idea to meet them...

Clear tugs his arm. "Aoba-san, let's go! Please, your parents, they're right here, aren't they?"

Aoba looks at him, at the nervousness and longing in Clear's face, and draws a shaky breath. That's right. If he doesn't move, he won't see them. There's the risk of missing them; what if they had already checked out? They're here now. He's here now. 

'Now' is the only real thing.

He takes off again, following the floor layout, down the stairs again, through a back hall, out into a warm terrace with plants everywhere, a table, a couple taking tea--

Heart filling his throat, Aoba somehow manages to call out. "Mom? ...Dad?"

They look up as one, both wide-eyed.

Looking at them now, some things become very apparent to Aoba that he missed when he was too young to notice. His mother, of course, is very much herself; in her early forties now, she's put on some weight on her hips and legs, a few wrinkles around her mouth and eyes from smiling, and her hair's a lot shorter than the enormous mass it had been, probably for the heat, but she's still very clearly Seragaki Haruka. Nine, in comparison, hasn't changed at all. He's the same as as Aoba remembers him: _exactly_ the same. He is also, at this point, much younger than Haruka. His skin isn't just pale, it's bone white, and Aoba can see fangs lightly denting his lower lip. His father, he realizes, isn't human. The reasons he might want to run from Toue are, as an adult, incredibly apparent. Probably, Toue created him.

All these thoughts rush through his head as he looks at his parents again for the first time as an adult, as he assesses them as individuals with the distance of time. He wonders, briefly, what they think doing the same, assessing him as an adult, as an individual, if they even recognize him -- and then those thoughts vanish completely into the _now_ as they both fling themselves up with a cry, Haruka wailing, "Aoba!" and scrambling across the terrace to throw herself against him. He catches his mother in his arms and starts to cry, desperate, as his father joins her, scoops both him and Ren up and hugs them hard.

"Aoba," Nine says. "You've sure grown up. The island is -- is it open? You can travel? You came here to find us?"

He manages, through his tears, an _uh-huh_ , and the squirming bundle between them recalls him to the fact they're not alone. He hefts Ren's bag against them, into the hug. "Oh, uh, Mom, Dad, this is --"

"Ren, hmm?" Nine murmurs, and grins wide around his fangs, hugging even harder. "That's a good name, isn't it."

Aoba doesn't ask; even he remembers enough to know that Nine probably can read minds at least a little, and would at least be able to pick out his Allmate's name. It's enough that Nine is including him, loving him too, that Haruka, following his lead, hugs tighter as well, rushing the air out of himself and making Ren stammer out an awkward, embarrassed greeting.

But that's not it; it's not just that, either. He pulls back after a moment, forcing them to arm's length, smiling, and looks behind him.

Clear is hovering in the entrance, pressed against the door frame as if he doesn't know what to do with himself, and the look on his face is almost lonely. Aoba's heart stutters at that; of course it is. Of course it is. Clear doesn't know if he'll be welcome here, among Aoba's family who he was never a part of. Clear also absolutely must be thinking of the family he's lost, family he will never again be reunited with.

"Clear," Aoba says. Clear freezes up even more obviously, and Aoba pulls away from his parents, leaving a startled Ren in Nine's embrace, and holds out a hand to Clear. "Clear, come here."

What could he do? He comes, of course, as always when Aoba calls, takes his hand, already blushing and looking at his feet and obviously wishing he had a mask to hide behind.

"This is Clear," Aoba says. "My boyfriend."

"Ah!!" Haruka makes a sort of wild gesture, and then tosses herself on Clear as well. "I was wondering what sort of person Aoba would fall for!"

Clear, amazed, is left stammering. "I am, that is to say, I suppose I'm, it's not that I'm much of a person, but--"

"Don't be absurd," Nine says. He passes Ren back to Aoba, gentle, and squeezes Clear's shoulder. They're of a height, and Nine only looks a little older than Clear. "You've got a beautiful voice. So you're definitely a person, aren't you?"

It's completely nonsensical, but whatever Nine means by that, Clear seems to be moved; tears well up, spill down his cheeks, and he manages to nod. Aoba lets go of trying to make sense of things anyway. Right now, this entire moment doesn't make any sense. It's totally implausible, no matter how he thinks about it.

This time, he's the one who initiates the hug, pulls his family against him, just enjoys the moment for what it is. All of them holding each other, he looks up, trying to suck in great gasps of air through his tears, and sees a flicker of blue movement.

A butterfly is flying overhead.

It's too spontaneously amazing, too unreal to exist right now. That settles it, he thinks, this must be a dream. But he doesn't wake up, and it seems despite the implausibility, this moment is real.


End file.
